California Biographies
Transcribed by Peggy Hooper
This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm
Source:
History of the state of California and biographical record of the San Joaquin
Valley, California. An historical story of the state's marvelous growth from
its earliest settlement to the present time.
Prof. James Miller Guinn , A. M.
The Chapman Publishing Co., Chicago 1905
Notes: Missing Page: 865-866,983-984,1175-1176
RICHARD HENRY ENDICOTT, M. D. During the twenty-nine years Dr. Richard Henry
Endicott has pursued the practice of medicine in California, he has been known not only for
his skill and assiduity as a physician, but also for the genial urbanity of his manners, his liter-
ary taste and talent, and for his popularity as a member of its social circles. He has gained pro-
fessional eminence by none of the arts of the charlatan, neither has he sought it in special lines
of practice. He has been content to follow the beaten track in which physicians educated in the
highest sense of the regular school, and loyal to its ethical code, seek rather to merit recognition
by their knowledge and skill, than to gain notoriety by the more questionable methods by which
less meritorious practitioners find a short cut to fame and fortune. Few, engrossed in the absorb-
ing occupations of life, appreciate the patience, the self-denying application, the weight of care
and anxiety, and the enormous responsibility which attends the life of the meritorious phy-
sician. It is the pride of the many families which have come to regard Dr. Endicott as an integral
part of their households, that he belongs to and adorns this class of professional men.
It is pleasing to note that Dr. Endicott belongs to the only American aristocracy, that of brains
and birth. An ennobling ancestry set up in his childish heart an ideal which the years have not
diminished or changed, and which has served as a spur in overcoming obstacles and discouraging
drawbacks. Born in Ridgely, Platte county, Mo., October 9, 1845, he is a lineal descendant of
Governor John Endicott of Massachusetts, that zealous Puritan, Indian fighter and executive,
who was born in Dorchester, England, in 1589, and who died in Boston, Mass., March 15, 1665.
Later members of the family made their way to Virginia, where Joseph Endicott, the paternal
great-grandfather of the doctor was born, and from which state he emigrated to Bourbon coun-
ty, Ky., in the early days of its plantation supremacy. His son William, the next in line of succes-
sion, was born in Bourbon county, as was also his son, Richard Bohannan Endicott, the father
of Richard Henry. William Endicott moved from Bourbon to Henry county, Ky., later mak-
ing his home in Platte county. Mo., where he conducted farming until his death. Dr. Endi-
cott 's mother, formerly Dieza L. Cartwright, was a niece of that famous Methodist Episcopal cir-
cuit preacher, Peter Cartwright, who flourished in the latter part of the eighteenth and fore
part of the nineteenth centuries. She was a daughter of Isaac Cartwright, a planter of North
Carolina, where she was born, and from there she went overland with horse teams to Missouri.
Richard Endicott made a fair success of farming in Platte county, reared his family of four sons
and two daughters, three of whom are living, and spent his declining years on a farm in Clay-
county, where his life ended just as the Civil war burst in fury over the land in 1861. Two
of his sons entered the medical profession, J. M., the oldest, practicing for many years in Oakdale,
this state, where his death occurred.
Dr. Endicott is one of the many successful men of to-day who had their characters set and
their thoughts turned into serious and responsible channels by the Civil war. When the call
for volunteers broke into the occupations of men, he was a hard-working farmer lad with little
thought of the future, and at the time of his discharge in St. Louis, July 6, 1865, he was still
a youth, whose nineteen years would scarcely seem to warrant the serious and earnest outlook
upon life. Enlisting in Company K, Eighteenth Missouri Volunteer Infantry, in 1862, he was
mustered in at Macon, Mo., and after serving six months was taken ill and discharged for dis-
ability. Enlisting in 1863 in Company A, Fourth Missouri Cavalry, he participated in the second
battle of Springfield, January 8, 1863; the battle of Jefferson City, Mo.; of Marshalltown; Big
Blue ; Little Blue ; besides numerous skirmishes and cavalry dashes, and spent the winter of 1864
in quarters at Sedalia, Mo. When peace settled over the country he returned to his home in
Missouri and attended Ridgely Academy, completing the course in 1868. A closely following
experience was a journey to Colorado as a contractor on the Union Pacific Railway in Wy-
oming, and after the completion of the road he returned to Missouri and began to study medi-
cine under his brother, J. M. Endicott. At the same time he engaged in the drug business, and
in 1871 removed his store to Peru, Kans., where he continued in the store until entering the Col-
lege of Physicians and Surgeons at Keokuk, Iowa, from which he was graduated in the class
of 1875.
At the outset of his professional career Dr. Endicott wisely chose California as his most
likely field of effort, practicing in Hollister from the fall of 1875 until 1876. and then locating in
Darwin, Inyo county, where he remained a few months. He next located in Sacramento, and
from there he removed to Bakersfield in 1877, assuming the position of superintendent and phy-
sician of the county hospital. For five years he practiced medicine in Riovista, Solano county,
and in 1883 took a much needed rest in the east, visiting different cities and hospitals, and taking
a course at a hospital in St. Louis. Returning to California in 1884, he practiced in Gilroy
until 1886, and for the following seven years worked up a large practice in Oakdale. In 1893
he located in Stockton, from which headquarters he followed mining in Tuolumne and Eldorado
counties, becoming interested as organizer and promoter in several large properties. He was a
member of the company which opened the Red Cloud mine, near Plymouth, organized the Red
Cloud Company and opened the North Star and Black Warrior mines in Tuolumne county. He
also became interested in the Noonday mine in Tuolumne county, which they mined for several
seasons, and a quarter of which he still owns. In 1901 the doctor settled in Riovista, duplicated
his former success until 1904, in which year he became a resident of Oakdale, to which he
brought a splendid reputation for erudition and ability. Dr. Endicott has a son by his former
marriage, Edwin E., who shares his professional tendency, and is now a practicing surgeon of
Jackson, Cal. He was educated in the public schools and graduated from the Kentucky School
of Medicine in Louisville in 1894. In Stockton Dr. Endicott married for his second wife, Lulu
Bechtol, a native of Clark county, Mo., and the mother of two children : Jessie, a graduate of
the Stockton high school, and Albert. Dr. Endicott is a Mason and Knight of Pythias, and in
politics is a Republican. His intellectual character is marked by strong qualities and positive
convictions, which are tempered by kindly feeling and sympathy for the weak, while his profes-
sional endowments are of the kind which have tended to inspire confidence in his ability and a
retention of his services as long as they were available in a given locality. He is a sincere and
high-minded gentleman, proud of his good name, his many and loyal friends and the success
which has been so fairly and strenuously won.